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- Title
Topic agreement in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands).
- Authors
Crasborn, Onno; van der Kooij, Els; Ros, Johan; de Hoop, Helen
- Abstract
In this article we investigate topics in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands). NGT is a topic-prominent language in which sentences start with the topic(s) and the remainder of the sentence is interpreted as a comment about that topic. Topics are identifiable in NGT first and foremost by their prosody: they always form a separate prosodic unit. We show that NGT has different types of topics that can precede the rest of the sentence: argument topics and spatio-temporal topics. Both types of topic occur sentence-initially, but when both are present in one sentence, argument topics precede spatio-temporal topics. The main aim of our article is to argue that all types of topics can be referred to by sentence-final indexes, contra Bos (Pronoun copy in Sign Language of the Netherlands: 1–3, Signum, 1995) who claimed that copied sentence-final indexes always refer to subjects. We will analyze these clause-final anaphoric pronouns as an instantiation of topic agreement. Thus, we argue that NGT has topic agreement.
- Subjects
NETHERLANDS; DUTCH Sign Language; SENTENCES (Grammar); VERSIFICATION; ORDER (Grammar); CONSTRUCTION grammar
- Publication
Linguistic Review, 2009, Vol 26, Issue 2/3, p355
- ISSN
0167-6318
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/tlir.2009.013